From NPR: \"So you’re at work one day and you’re talking to your colleagues in t

Question

From NPR:

"So you’re at work one day and you’re talking to your colleagues in that professional, polite, kind of buttoned-up voice that people use when they’re doing professional work stuff. Your mom or your friend or your partner calls on the phone and you answer. And without thinking, you start talking to them in an entirely different voice — still distinctly your voice, but a certain kind of your voice less suited for the office. You drop the g’s at the end of your verbs. Your previously undetectable accent — your easy Southern drawl or your sing-songy Caribbean lilt or your Spanish-inflected vowels or your New Yawker — is suddenly turned way, way up. You rush your mom or whomever off the phone in some less formal syntax (“Yo, I’mma holler at you later”), hang up and get back to work.Then you look up and you see your co-workers looking at you and wondering who the hell you’d morphed into for the last few minutes. That right there? That’s what it means to code-switch".

develop a well-thought-out original response by writing a summary of what you read, addressing the following questions:

• Do you code switch?

• What do you gain from it?

•  Think about how you react to people who speak the way Idris speaks on the basketball court.

• Contrast that with the way you react to people who speak the way Idris speaks off the court.

• What assumptions do you make about people based on the way they speak?

Explanation / Answer

In the given case scenario, I have been shown to be a person of dual languages and the difference in my voice tone and my accent is seen as soon as there is a shift in dimension from one setting to another, in this case from the office to the house environment.

1. Yes, I do code switch.

2. When I code switch, it is not for any particular purpose or intention to achieve something. It just happens, more particularly a difference is language. There are reasons for this. The language I speak at home is not known by many people, or even te tone in which I talk at home is not appropriate with a firm's setting. In order to keep professionalism at its place, this formal tone is required.

5. What assumptions do you make for people on the way that they speak.

People speak in different languages, but when someone at work place talks in an informal, without G's language, it appears that person is not aware of the work etiquettes and does not know how to talk in a work place. Also, the first impression of that person comes out to be mannerless.

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